Nine out of ten drug candidates fail in clinical trials. Billions of dollars. Years of research. Lost.
Dr. Jo Varshney has spent the last several years building technology designed to change those odds, and the world is beginning to take notice. Inc. has named the VeriSIM Life Founder and CEO to its Female Founders 500, recognizing her work advancing predictive technologies that help pharma and biotech companies make better decisions about drug safety and efficacy earlier in development.
Dr. Varshney’s path to becoming a tech founder was anything but conventional. Raised in India in a family immersed in pharmacology and mathematics, she began coding at age eight and developed an early fascination with biology. She later trained as a veterinarian and moved to the United States to pursue research in computational biology.
Her work took her through Penn State, University of Minnesota, and Genentech. Across these experiences, she repeatedly encountered the same persistent challenge: the animal models that underpin much of the pharmaceutical industry often fail to predict how drugs will behave in humans.
Rather than accept that gap, Dr. Varshney began exploring how computational biology and artificial intelligence could be used to model drug behavior across complex biological systems. Early prototypes of this work gained attention during a hackathon and helped validate the concept, ultimately leading her to found VeriSIM Life as a solo founder.
Today that early work has evolved into BIOiSIM®, VeriSIM Life’s patented translational AI platform designed to simulate how drugs interact with human biology before clinical trials begin.
The platform combines mechanistic biological simulations with explainable AI to predict drug safety, efficacy, and dosing behavior earlier in development. At the center of the system is VeriSIM Life’s Translational Index™, a proprietary framework that evaluates how likely a drug candidate is to succeed in humans by integrating biological, chemical, and pharmacological signals.
Together, these technologies are helping define a new model for drug development—one that is predictive rather than reactive.
By generating human-relevant insights earlier in the pipeline, the platform helps pharmaceutical teams prioritize the most promising drug candidates while avoiding costly late-stage failures.
That same mindset shapes the culture at VeriSIM Life. Rather than shying away from the complexity of human biology, the team focuses on solving some of the hardest problems in drug development. By bringing together expertise in biology, computational science, and engineering, the company encourages ideas from across disciplines to tackle challenges the industry has struggled with for decades.
The company’s progress reflects growing interest in predictive approaches to drug development. VeriSIM Life has raised more than $25 million in funding, established collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners, and built a growing therapeutic pipeline. Its lead program, PT001, is advancing toward its first human clinical studies.
VeriSIM Life has also expanded its discovery capabilities through the acquisition of Molomics Biotech, strengthening the platform’s ability to explore large chemical and biological search spaces during early drug discovery.
Dr. Varshney’s work has earned several recognitions, including a Gold Stevie® Award and placement on the 100 Women in AI list. Her selection for the Inc. Female Founders 500 highlights the growing role of AI driven predictive technologies in transforming drug development.
“Drug development has relied on guesswork for far too long,” said Dr. Jo Varshney, Founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life. “By helping researchers understand how medicines will behave in humans much earlier in the process, we can make better decisions, reduce failure, and ultimately bring better therapies to patients faster.”
Dr. Divesh Bhatt, Head of Technology at VeriSIM Life, added, “It is very easy to point out what is broken. What matters is finding solutions. At VeriSIM Life, we encourage people to bring forward ideas from everywhere, because you never know where the next breakthrough may come from.”
From writing code as a child in India to building a company advancing predictive drug development, Dr. Varshney represents a new generation of founders bringing computational science and biology together to reshape how medicines are discovered.
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